With a darkly alluring history and host of fine restaurants, this sleepy coastal village punches well above its weight

As with all the most seductive tourist destinations — think Russia, North Korea, Burma — the sleepy Suffolk village of Orford has a darkly alluring recent history. Walk through its market square, past its cottages, church and castle, and you reach the quay. Children crab, pensioners sit in a gently dilapidated tea house and there, across a narrow strip of water, buffering the weekenders’ sail boats from the full force of the North Sea, lies Orford Ness, scene of some of the most intense and secretive military testing this country has ever known.